OpenCPN

[sinbad7]

Tia Bu..
I've placed the large cm93 file at the top of the directory and all other chart files
in the Shipplotter/COAA/charts sub-directory. See below:




You see where the selected directories are highlighted before being added.

Hope it will be some help.

Regards
Tore

[cagney]

Tia Bu
You have to load /home/marshall/CM93 into OpenCPNs "Actice Chart Directories", as there are some files in this directory needed by CM93.
To compare, these are the two lines right now in my "Active Chart Diretctories":

/opt/Navigation/Charts/ENC/SCSENC
/opt/Navigation/Charts/CM93

I suppose that you have loaded charts the "SeaClear" way, that is probably why you get this line:
10:00:01 PM: CM93Composite Chart Init cannot locate CM93 dictionary.

This is in line with sinbad7 but in Ubuntu-lingo.

Thomas

[Tia Bu]

Thanks so much, guys. At least the process is clearer to me now, but I still can't get it to work. I have carefully put together a complete CM 93 folder from another source. I even deleted the old folder and carefully put everything in a new folder to make sure it wasn't some file manager problem in Ubuntu. I put the CM 93 directory as the ONLY line in my "Active Chart Directories". And here's what I get. (What is that pesky "CM 93 dictionary" and where's it SUPPOSED to be? :-))

11:08:16 AM:


11:08:16 AM: 2009-07-18 -------Starting opencpn-------
11:08:16 AM: Using existing Config_File: /home/marshall/.opencpn/opencpn.conf
11:08:16 AM: Setting Viewpoint Lat/Lon 51.7607, -6.3656
11:08:16 AM: Using s57data in /usr/local/share/opencpn/s57data
11:08:16 AM: Using Tide/Current data from: /usr/local/share/opencpn/tcdata/
11:08:16 AM: Setting Viewpoint Lat/Lon 51.7607, -6.3656
11:08:16 AM: NMEA Data Source is....None
11:08:16 AM: AIS Data Source is....None
11:08:16 AM: Using WVSChart datafile: /usr/local/share/opencpn/wvsdata/wvs43.dat
11:08:16 AM: NMEA AutoPilot Port is....None
11:08:16 AM: MemoryStatus: mem_total: 1479676 kb, mem_initial: 388256 kb
11:08:17 AM: Initializing Chart /home/marshall/CM93/00300000/A/00300000.A
11:08:17 AM: CM93Composite Chart Init cannot locate CM93 dictionary.
11:08:17 AM: OpenChartFromStack...Error opening chart /home/marshall/CM93/00300000/A/00300000.A at index 0, return code 2
11:08:41 AM: searching for .geo
11:08:41 AM: searching for .KAP
11:08:41 AM: searching for .000
11:08:41 AM: searching for .S57
11:08:41 AM: searching for .CM93
11:08:41 AM: Create ChartTable Entry for /home/marshall/CM 93/00300000/A/00300000.A
11:08:42 AM: Initializing Chart /home/marshall/CM 93/00300000/A/00300000.A
11:08:42 AM: CM93Composite Chart Init cannot locate CM93 dictionary.
11:08:42 AM: OpenChartFromStack...Error opening chart /home/marshall/CM 93/00300000/A/00300000.A at index 0, return code 2

[cagney]

Tia Bu

Do you have the following files on your computer?
/home/marshall/CM93/20021201.EXD
/home/marshall/CM93/CHRLIST.BIN
/home/marshall/CM93/CM93ATTR.DIC
/home/marshall/CM93/CM93OBJ.DIC
/home/marshall/CM93/LIMITS.DIC
/home/marshall/CM93/SERIALNO.TXT

Another thought. If you start OpenCpn from the command line by executing the command "opencpn" , do you get any kind of output?

Thomas

[Tia Bu]

Cagney:

Success at last! The files you mentioned were on the computer, but they were buried one subdirectory farther down than the CM93 directory. When I moved them up one level, all the charts immediately appeared. I don't know if this qualifies as a bug or as user error/ignorance :-), but at least it's all documented here for Dave if it's of use to him. Thanks to all of your for your help!

[cagney]

Never give up!

[sinbad7]

Cagney... "Remember it's never too late to give up!!"

[bdbcat]

Tia Bu....

I'm following along here. I think the sensitivity to location of the extra CM93 files is a bug.

Where exactly were the extra files when it did not work, and where did you move them to make it work? Ubuntu-lingo OK.

Thanks for all the help. We build a knowledge base.....

Dave

[sinbad7]

Dave...

As I have a good many nav. progs. I normally keep all my charts/maps in ONE main directory shipplotter/COAA/chart files,all except the cm93 files which I keep at the very top of drive D:\cm93.

All of the cm93 files should be together (plus sub-dir) and should look as follows:

[Tia Bu]

Dave:

The critical files were in home\marshall\cm93\cm93. I moved them up to home\marshall\cm93, which is the "active chart directory". Possibly the subdirectory having the same name as the parent directory (not sure how this happened) was the problem?

I notice though that Open CPN has no trouble loading up RNC charts just as they unzip from a NOAA download, even though the .KAP files are two or three sublevels down from the "active chart directory" I specify. So I don't know why it would have trouble finding these files just one level down.

At any rate, this is truly a revolutionary bit of software. Congratulations and thanks! What a cool thing!

[bdbcat]

Tia Bu...

Thanks for the info. I see the problem here. Will be fixed in the next release, so that the required auxiliary dictionary files, viz.

CM93OBJ.DIC
CM92ATTR.DIC

may be located anywhere in within the selected cm93 directory tree.

Finding these files at run-time may be slow, if we have to search the entire cm93 tree. Thousands of files.... However, once we find them, we can leave a hint in the opencpn configuration file, so that subsequent searches go right to them.

Thanks all for the help.
Dave

[bdbcat]

A little AIS school...

(Simplified)
AIS messages are transmitted at variable times based upon their content.

Type [1] position reports are transmitted as often as every 6 seconds for high speed vessels, roughly every 20 secs for most underway ships, and infrequently for moored ships.

Type [5] Ship Static Data reports are transmitted no more often than every 6 minutes. This is the message which contains the ship name, dimensions, IMO number, type, etc.

All messages contain the ship's MMSI number, which is unique to every ship in the world.

This is a real-time radio link. For a variety of reasons, messages can be and are lost. Thanks why type[1] messages, critical for collision avoidance, are sent so often.

What this means to opencpn:
a. You should set the Toolbox->AIS->Lost Targets values to something greater than 6 minutes. I use 12 minutes. That way, the targets stay on-screen long enough to ensure receipt of a type [5] message.

b. Targets will show as yellow (name is unknown) until a type [5] message is received. Then they go green.


A little info on Shipplotter, representative of a number of worldwide AIS monitoring applications available:

Shipplotter maintains a cache file on your computer, matching MMSI number to ship name. This file persists from run-to-run, so that when Shipplotter starts up, all ships for which any message is received may be named. This is done by extracting the MMSI number from the message, and looking in the persistent cache file for the displayed name, which may have been received as a type [5] message earlier today, or last week. Fair enough, since MMSI numbers are unique to ships, and presumably their names.

For Shipplotter, the cache files are stored in
Documents and Settings\{user]\Application Data\COAA\Shipplotter\log files.

Other systems such as VTSLite from SiiTech no doubt use the same sort of caching.

Opencpn maintains no persistent external cache of MMSI number <-> ShipName. Opencpn will display a ship name only after receipt of a valid, real-time message type [5].

I hope this clarifies the operation and logic of opencpn.

Dave

[idpnd]

Thanks for the clarification Dave. Is it possible to get said AIS data stream on Linux for testing purposes?

Best regards

Max

[phiggins]

Dave,

I wrote a program to convert all my SeaClear routes and tracks to GPX format. The routes show up on openCPN fine but beacuse there are so may points in the tracks when I show it on a fairly large scale chart (or is small scale? anyway a chart that shows a larger area) on openCPN the arrow size makes the route very difficult to see. Is it possible to make the arrows smaller on when the chart gets larger? Also to avoid a lot of clutter I left off the symbol and name for the points but you show the word 'null' when I do this, can you not put the null please.

Here is all I have in each rte point:

<rtept lat="43.95302" lon="-78.16500">
</rtept>

The route shows up fine on Google Earth.

Here is a picture to show you what it looks like on openCPN and GE:

[bdbcat]

phiggins...

re Route imports:
All good ideas. Could you email me a sample route GPX file for testing?

Dave